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Intel Drops A Load Of G45 Programming Documentation

Phoronix: Intel Drops A Load Of G45 Programming Documentation

While Intel has long backed an open-source graphics driver for their integrated graphics driver, it was not up until last year when Intel released the i965/G35 documentation that there was public, NDA-free documentation concerning their newer IGPs. Later that year they then released the GMA X4500HD series and since then we have been waiting for them to push out public documentation concerning their G45 chipset. Well, Intel has finally come to the table with this documentation and it is very extensive. This documentation drop today is split into several volumes and makes up well over 1,000 pages of Intel hardware documentation and register descriptions that are available under the Creative Common Attribution, No Derivative Works license.

Does this documentation cover any part of the video decoding hardware (h264/vc1) ?

There is some stuff there about data formats (see e.g. Chapter 10 in Volume 2 of the G45 doc), but as I'm not an expert on these codecs I have no idea whether it's enough to be of any practical benefit to someone wanting to write a decoder.

Michael, It's great to see all this documentation being put out there (Intel and AMD), I would be interested in an article on the experiences of the open source video card driver developers and Linux driver programming in general.

What have the Intel/AMD developers experienced as the benefits and drawbacks to open source development? Are there many or any community contributions? Does the open source approach truly help mitigate the challenges of programming for Linux's constantly evolving environment (respecting that much of the evolving that is being driven from places like Intel) versus Windows relatively static target. (etc.)

Yes, it is great to see these contributions. Much respect to you, Intel and AMD. And also a big thanks to everybody involved in the actual development, and testing/bugreporting, of the open source drivers!

Does this documentation cover any part of the video decoding hardware (h264/vc1) ?

Actually it looks pretty good. Not something that your average code-monkey (i.e. me) could take and turn into a working decoder, but it does look like the required parts are documented. There's a worked example for MPEG2, which could presumably be used as a conceptual base for other decoders.

The question I have is, who would do such work? The people who are working on the xf86-video-intel driver seem to have their hands full with 2D+3D work, and I haven't seen any other volunteers step up for media work.

So it looks hopeful, but I don't think we'll see anything usable for quite a while.